What’s happening now in Syria is increasingly complicated. Urban warfare is difficult and costly, as countless civilians pay the ultimate price for indiscriminate shelling and armed attacks in residential areas. Numerous YouTube videos continue to show such indiscriminate shelling in residential areas. A severe humanitarian crisis is emerging in some Syrian cities.

While no one should discount the loss of civilian life in Syria on a daily basis, US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS) Gen. Martin Dempsey is correct (in terms of tactical assessments) to point out that, according to Al Arabiya News paraphrasing him: “Syria was the focus of competing Middle Eastern states, notably Iran and Saudi Arabia, and posed different problems for the United States than Libya did.”

In other words, Syria is now the “rumble in the jungle” for a number of external powers, seeking to realize their own interests and agendas for a post-Bashar al-Assad Syria. I wrote about this in a previous blog post, “The Saudi Specter in Syria and the World.” What this means is that Syria is now the multidimensional chessboard for internal and external players, not unlike the case of the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990).

Says Gen. Dempsey: “There’s indications that al-Qaeda is involved and that they’re interested in supporting the opposition. I mean there’s a number of players, all of whom are trying to reinforce their particular side of this issue.”

While I cannot independently verify the presence of Al Qaeda in Syria (although last week Ayman al-Zawahiri issued a video calling on Muslims to support the Syrian rebels against Assad), clearly there are many hyena packs lurking in and around this jungle. The hyena Assad is not alone in his pack. Various other hyena packs also roam in the darkness, including Iran, Hezbollah, Russia, and China, and perhaps numerous proxies, and we cannot dismiss the respective interests and agendas of Lebanon, Israel, Iraq, Jordan, Turkey, European powers, and the United States. Continuing with Gen. Dempsey’s assessment:

“Dempsey identified ‘a Sunni-Shiite competition for, you know, regional control,’ of Syria being played out between Saudi Arabia and Iran as a key barrier to U.S. intervention, as well as Damascus’s ‘very capable’ military. They have a very sophisticated, integrated air defense system. They have chemical and biological weapons. They haven’t demonstrated any interest or any intent to use those, but it is a very different military problem,’ Dempsey said, noting he had not yet been asked to provide U.S. military options on Syria.

… ‘It was a big mistake to think of this as another Libya’, he added.”

Meanwhile, on February 24 a meeting of various global diplomats will convene in Tunis, supported by the Arab League, to discuss support for the Free Syrian Army and provide humanitarian relief to civilians. Interestingly, the Free Syrian Army has its own Facebook (FB) page, and also its opponents have set up a FB page called “Eliminate the Free Syrian Army,” and in parentheses you see “(Al Qaeda Army),” so it appears as: “Eliminate the Free Syrian Army (Al Qaeda Army).”

Therefore, the cyber battle and diplomatic maneuvering all mirror the ongoing conflict inside Syria. This is an example of modern, literally multidimensional conflict, which includes cyberspace. Sadly, what gets lost in the messages is the ability for the rest of the world to extract the “TRUTH” behind the rhetoric and fog of war.

Moreover, as an international affairs analyst, I cannot fail to be mindful of the parallel crisis involving Iran’s nuclear program, and how elements of the power play between all of these players are seeping into the Syrian jungle. Gen. Dempsey referred to Iran as a “rational actor,” in terms of how the regime calculates its courses of action. That’s the basic presumption of state actors in international relations, but often states cross the line of rationality, like Assad’s regime, in the zeal for power and power projection. In the end, they only end up looking like bloody-fanged hyenas.

NOTE: Everything I write in this blog constitutes my personal opinions and views.

When I lived in Damascus, at the time the TV had only two channels. One of them used to broadcast Russian ballet performances quite regularly. Also, Iranian pilgrims were everywhere. An entire segment of the Syrian tourist industry has been set aside just for Iranian pilgrims visiting important Shia shrines. I saw busloads, and I even learned that certain hotels were exclusively serving Iranian patrons.

So, the official public UN stance of Russia in vetoing the resolution last week, along with the Iranian regime’s less public military and security support for the Assad regime, all come as little surprise to me. But, both Russia and Iran are playing a most heinous and ominous role in the destruction of the Syrian people, including countless unarmed civilians, women, men, and children alike. Michael Weiss published an article in the Telegraph that explicitly describes what’s happening in Syria, and the complicity of Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah in the slaughter of thousands:

“For those who haven’t had lunch today, I encourage you to see up-close what Russian weapons and Iranian and Hezbollah ‘military consultants’ have helped accomplish in Syria. This video is of a young boy in Homs. His entire lower jaw has been removed from his head and I’m told that this is more watchable version of the footage; an earlier reel went round where he hadn’t been anaesthetized yet.”

“Vladimir Putin’s copper-bottomed support for Bashar al-Assad at the UN Security Council can be taken in one of two ways. There will be those who claim that here was one organized crime lord pledging solidarity with his human ferret counterpart. The two men really do understand each other and are even beginning to replicate each other’s CVs. Assad is doing to Syria what Putin did to Chechnya a decade ago and under the same pretext of combating “terrorists”. Moscow had its dodgy apartment bombings in 1999, blamed with credible evidence on the FSB, to justify the razing of Grozny. Damascus has had its spate of “suicide bombings” lately, blamed by the regime on the following actors: al-Qaida, the United States, Israel, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Syrian opposition and loyalists of former Syrian Vice President Abdul Halim Khaddam. Footage showing the mukhabarat’s theatrics before and after these incidents matters not at all because the Assad regime, with a little help from Russia Today and other Kremlin mouthpieces, has also blamed “foreign media” for presenting a mere domestic misunderstanding as a full-blown humanitarian crisis. Taken another way, Putin’s support for Assad is a foreign policy “victory” that comes at just the right time for Russia, weeks ahead of a presidential election.

…If certain comment editors have difficulty finding Syrians on the ground who want NATO fighter jets overhead, I’ll be glad to introduce them to several.

Here is al-Sheikh: ‘As an activist and a coordinator for the Khaled Bin Waleed brigade, I state that we in Homs, Idlib and Damascus suburbs call for unilateral American and British intervention. We also want to improve our relations with the US administration and people after the revolution, but we need you to save us. We are getting slaughtered, save us’.”

You don’t need me to point out that the United Nations has miserably failed the Syrian people. The UN is broken and is far from democratic. If anything, this whole incident underscores the need for a UN overhaul; at a minimum, there should be provisions for those countries that wish to implement the R2P mandate in cases such as Syria to override Security Council vetoes. I am a diehard believer in state sovereignty, but I am a human rights activist first and foremost. Russia, Iran, and China have done a tremendous disservice to humanity. Now, Assad is having a field day in exterminating his own people: protesters and by-standers alike, civilians making a run for it to grab some bread (now in dire short supply), families huddling in their homes, and individuals picked off by snipers.

This reminds me of the bloody, ruthless killings in the former Yugoslavia. The Yugoslavia analogy is not off base… remember how long it finally took Western powers to intervene in Bosnia and stop the massacres?!! You’d think that we all have learned from lessons past.

The Syrian people have the right to live without fear. Most of all, they have the right to live. What the hell happened to the “Responsibility to Protect” civilians, that was so potently invoked in the case of Libya? I write this with a very heavy heart for Syria, and wish that ballet performances would have been the extent of Syrian-Russian relations. Sadly, it’s not.

NOTE: Everything I write in this blog constitutes my personal opinions and views.